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So this post has a misleading title… Because I’m not going to explain how this works, Azure Websites continuous deployment is not anything really new, and also It’s well documented here and here.

Anyhow, the family and I recently moved into a new house. Our ISP was out today, running cables and getting things setup. Since I didn’t really know how well my wireless router was going to cover the house, I asked Nick the fella working on getting me back online, if he had the ability to do a wireless survey of my house.

Nick said, “Well they give us this Airport Utillity app on our phone. I can tell you what the db levels are, but I’m not really sure what they mean”.

Problem: This person should be able to tell me what my signal quality is, room by room.

Solution: Five minutes googling with bing lead me to a Stack Overflow post that sounded smart enough and even had math explaining how to go from dBm to Quality percentage. Time to deploy something to Azure.

Enter Azure Websites Continuous Deployment. While he finished up the house, I started writing some quick code, pushed to GitHub, and setup my website in Azure to deploy from… you guessed it GitHub.

At this point you maybe asking: “Pray tell, how did you deploy to Azure with no internet connectivity?”.

To that I say: “With my Verizon Jetpack, of course”.

By the time he was finished, I’d installed the Airport Utility app on my iPhone. Ran around the house gathering the dBm metrics for each room, and plugged them into: http://wlansurvey.azurewebsites.net.

He was a little shocked, but took down the web address and said he was going to tell all the guys at the office.

Azure… There is plenty to keep up with, just dealing with the features that have been released. With that in mind, have you enabled the preview features? Take a minute and go to your subscription account portal and have a look… https://account.windowsazure.com/PreviewFeatures

Azure Batch

Have an application or parts of an application that does processor intensive work? Hand it off to Azure Batch. Basically it pushes your code to a designated amount of VMs and processes the task in parallel.

Auditing for Azure SQL Database

Exactly what it sounds like… It logs events to an Azure Storage account. What are some of these events you might ask? I’m glad you did: Accessing data, Schema changes, data changes, accounts, roles, permissions, security exceptions. For a complete reference see the Audit Log Format Reference DOCX.

Operational Insights

Need to monitor a lot of machines? This is what Operational Insights is good at… Install an agent. It talks to Azure Operational Insights web service running in … well Azure. There is a portal where you can create all kinds of great looking dashboards and reports.

PlayReady License Server

So you run a live video feed of an event, or a video on demand service and you want to secure your content. You can with PlayReady. This is a token issuing service that allows a player to decrypt your video content. You should check this out if you’re doing anything with video… all the cool kids are using it, and it’s in my wheel house. Shoot me an email if you’d like to discuss more.

Azure Premium Storage

Stream Analytics

Real time data analytics allows you to analyze patterns in data streams or historical data before storing the events. Think… the backend to your IoT strategy. Not a lot of companies are thinking about their IoT strategy yet… but at Microsoft we are. This is why Gartner and other think-tanks are putting so much weight on data sciences in the coming future. You have been warned.

Windows Azure Files

For this you’ll run some PowerShell to create a file share in an Azure Storage account. VMs can then mount these as a network shares or you can access the share using the REST API, much like blob storage. Pretty sweet feature… one I’m using right now!

Billing Alert Service

If you’re the account administrator for your subscription, you can set an alert when you spend “X” amount of dollars. Not quite a billing API, but I configured a few alerts to let me know when I’ve spent different amounts of money.

DaaS for Azure Web Sites is a great tool when “bad things happen to a good site”! It allows you to collect a plethora of different logs and parses them into an easily digestible format. The idea is to enable you to get to root cause without turning to the forums or Microsoft support. I’m running a WordPress site that, knock on digital wood, is pretty rock solid. Even so, I’m going to use this site to play around.

Until the recent announcement, the collection and parsing of PHP logs wasn’t an option, but now DaaS will collect PHP specific files along with Event Logs, Memory Dumps and HTTP Logs. First you will need to enable Web Server Logging to the File System. With that down just browse over to https://<YourSiteName>.scm.azurewebsites.net/DaaS and you’ll get a page like this…

All you need to do is click Diagnose Now and your off to the races. Oh, and you can also schedule an analysis if you’d like…

We’ve all seen compute power sitting idle, costing us money… Well no more! Automate the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in your Microsoft Azure environment using a highly scalable and reliable workflow execution engine.

Up until recently, we’ve had to use the REST API to work with Management objects in Windows Azure. This is great as all the overhead is stripped away, and anything can access it. However a .Net developer has a little extra work around generating the URLs, Authentication, and making requests. The new Management API included in the .Net SDK is a welcome enhancement. It’s still in preview, and sometimes doesn’t work as expected… Here’s a little code to get you started.

Maybe I’m just late to the party, but this tool is just awesome! Install it! Run it, and say yes to let it create the default script. AutoHotKey has it’s own “language” and I use that term loosely. Here are a couple of helpful thing to note that should get you started. The semicolon is a comment:

This above command will launch the default browser and navigate to Bing when you press: ctrl + alt + shift + b. I don’t think that some of these long hotkeys seem that useful and frankly I will not remember them. There are however times, when, say I’m having to modify text by pressing down, over, over, over, backspace, backspace rinse and repeat. You know what I’m talking about… This is where AutoHotkey comes to the rescue. To do just that you would:

^#!f:: DownLeftLeftLeftBackspaceBackspaceReturn

You can even loop and other constructs… just awesome! Go forth and do.